Leaving the two concerts given by Chopin in 1841 and 1842 to be discussed in detail in the next chapter, I shall now give a translation of the Polish letters which he wrote in the summer and autumn of 1841 to Fontana.  The letters numbered 4 and 5 are those already alluded to on p. 24 (foot-note 3) which Karasowski gives as respectively dated by Chopin:  “Palma, November 17, 1838”; and “Valdemosa, January 9, 1839.”  But against these dates militate the contents:  the mention of Troupenas, with whom the composer’s business connection began only in 1840 (with the Sonata, Op. 35); the mention of the Tarantelle, which was not published until 1841; the mention (contradictory to an earlier inquiry—­see p. 30) of the sending back of a valet nowhere else alluded to; the mention of the sending and arrival of a piano, irreconcilable with the circumstances and certain statements in indisputably correctly-dated letters; and, lastly, the absence of all mention of Majorca and the Preludes, those important topics in the letters really from that place and of that time.  Karasowski thinks that the letters numbered 1, 2, 3, and 9 were of the year 1838, and those numbered 6, 7, and 8 of the year 1839; but as the “Tarantelle,” Op. 43, the “Polonaise,” Op. 44, the “Prelude,” Op. 45, the “Allegro de Concert,” Op. 46, the third “Ballade,” Op. 47, the two “Nocturnes,” Op. 48, and the “Fantaisie,” Op. 49, therein mentioned, were published in 1841, I have no doubt that they are of the year 1841.  The mention in the ninth letter of the Rue Pigalle, 16, George Sand’s and Chopin’s abode in Paris, of Pelletan, the tutor of George Sand’s son Maurice, and of the latter’s coming to Paris, speaks likewise against 1838 and for 1841, 1840 being out of the question, as neither George Sand nor Chopin was in this year at Nohant.  What decides me especially to reject the date 1839 for the seventh letter is that Pauline Garcia had then not yet become the wife of Louis Viardot.  There is, moreover, an allusion to a visit of Pauline Viardot to Nohant in the summer of 1841 in one of George Sand’s letters (August 13, 1841).  In this letter occurs a passage which is important for the dating both of the fifth and the seventh letter.  As to the order of succession of the letters, it may be wrong, it certainly does not altogether satisfy me; but it is the result of long and careful weighing of all the pros and cons.  I have some doubt about the seventh letter, which, read by the light of George Sand’s letter, ought perhaps to be placed after the ninth.  But the seventh letter is somewhat of a puzzle.  Puzzles, owing to his confused statements and slipshod style, are, however, not a rare thing in Chopin’s correspondence.  The passage in the above-mentioned letter of George Sand runs thus:  “Pauline leaves me on the 16th [of August]; Maurice goes on the 17th to fetch his sister, who should be here on the 23rd.”

  [I.] Nohant [1841].